Democracy was once a comforting fiction. Has it become an uninhabitable one?
By Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk
The Nation - May 13, 2014
If information technology turns out to have world-historical
significance, it is not because of its economic promise, still less
because it may facilitate the toppling of dictators. It is because
information technology makes plain that the story democracies have told
about themselves for more than two centuries has been a bluff.
Democracy, as we know it in the modern world, is based on a peculiar
compromise. The word to which we pay such homage means the “rule of the
people.” But insofar as we can claim to govern ourselves at all, we do
so in a remarkably indirect way. Every few years, the citizens of modern
democracies make their way to the polls to cast their votes for a
limited set of candidates. Once they have acquitted themselves of this
duty, their elected representatives take over. In the daily functioning
of democracy, the public is marginal.
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